I see a lot of concern that YG is just a meter padding spell compared with the on-demand save-someone's-life type stuff in the tier.

You can argue that the tick of YG is pretty much never going to save someone's life and be correct, but I would argue that being a hero that single handedly saves everyone in the raid isn't what a resto druid excels at anyway. You're there (in my opinion LULS) to provide a buffer for the other healers. You blanket the raid in hots so that damage coming in isn't as threatening and you slowly build people back up, leaving the other healers to chunk people's health back up to full. As far as winning on effective healing, you would prefer people not to be topped so that all your heals are effective.

Holy priests are sort of in a similar situation. Their mastery is the most useless thing ever to actually prevent people from dying, but as an effective healing increase, it's pretty damn good. They aren't meant to go hero mode and heal everyone from 0 to full. They're there to do the same thing as resto druid, only a little bit differently.

In this niche, YG does what it's supposed to do. It helps a bit with incoming damage, but it isn't going to rescue anyone from the clutches of death (unless you're very lucky) and it's limited by the fact that it prefers you over others first, even if you're at 99%. I'm not saying that druids are only good for blanketing rejuvs, but I think that's what they (almost always have) excel(led) at.

All direct healing spells leaving a hot is a lot different than 5% healing on one person every 5 seconds. The healing is not really worthwhile at all. Would you take a 5% heal on yourself every 5 seconds as an enchant over a high priority main stat or secondary stat? I sure as hell wouldn't. No one has claimed it's bad because it doesn't save a life, it's bad because it's so minimal it hardly makes a difference espeically since 99% of the time it heals you. If it was even only 1% but raid wide it's be 100x better.

Small little heals like that through talents, pieces of gear, additions to profession bonuses, weapon/trink procs, blah blah have never been something you sit and think 'man, this is useful'. It's still passive healing and healing is healing. The point most people were tyring to make is 1. it's in absolutely no way OP. 2. IF another talent in the tier is better for a fight you don't want to not use it because of YG. Losing YG isn't going to do anything but take away a tiny buffer heal that you really don't need.

First off the data doesn't really mean much. 1. it's not based by boss kill because it can't be yet. 2. People are clearly re-learning their class/fights as you can see by the spell usages 3. This was before recent changes, changes that were made and still being made because it's not balanced yet.

There will be fights where you won't be taking damage and someone else will, clearly 99% was an overexageration. That data is not accurate for what's going to happen on live though.

First off the data doesn't really mean much. 1. it's not based by boss kill because it can't be yet. 2. People are clearly re-learning their class/fights as you can see by the spell usages 3. This was before recent changes, changes that were made and still being made because it's not balanced yet.

There will be fights where you won't be taking damage and someone else will, clearly 99% was an overexageration. That data is not accurate for what's going to happen on live though.

Not really sure saying 'ptr numbers in a environment where the numbers aren't going to be accurate isn't the right way to judge a spell' is arguing semantics. Every single PTR has been the same. Look at X ptr logs, then when live hits the numbers are all completely different.

You can look at their raid makeup, spell usage, damage taken, and distribution of who got YG, how much it healed them, how much it overhealed them, and so on. Bosses obviously aren't all raid damage for 100% of the fight. When your 2 tanks are the people who get the spell the most, it leads to 1% of their healing taken, and overhealed 50+% of the time that's not going to probably be an accurate representation of what's going to happen on normal progression fights.

As I said, 99% was obviously an overexaggeration, but think about during new tier progression how often you are at 100% and it's not either down time or the few people taking damage are automatically healed back up.

Realistically it doesn't matter who it heals, but it is going to end up on you a lot. People have posted ptr logs where it's them or the tanks most of the time and it leads to 10-12% overall with way less overheal which is way different than these logs.

Does it really matter WHO will be healed by YG? As long as ticks aren't wasted, they're useful (obvious). No point in arguing about that.

As for YG vs the rest of the tier, just look at it this way: if YG will trump other talents (IMO it will in most PvE situations, since it's passive and buffs HPS), Blizz will have to change something. YG is far from being OP, so I think they'll have to buff CW and Renewal. It's a win-win situation.

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Also, I think that the argument about "YG being no more that a meter padder that makes other healers overheal" is nonsense. Following this logic, Disc priest are also no more than stupid useless meter padders whose only job is to make "true healers that save lives" overheal.

The healing from YG is good theoretically. A smart heal that doesn't even require any sort of activation is pretty powerful. However, in the Golden Age of Mistweavers and Disc, barring any sort of catastrophic event that leads to a wipe, pretty much all non-spike damage is being covered with very little effort thanks to Renewing Mist + Uplift/Atonement + Divine Aegis + PW:S. I'm picking on these two specs because I haven't encountered a group yet personally that doesn't use one or the other. All of this was exacerbated by the introduction of the healer meta gem; our Mistweaver can spam entire fights without ever going oom. With ever-present renewing mist/uplift spam competing with shields, there's seldom anything left to heal other than the tanks, and we can't direct where YG dumps its healing. I think I would prefer the massive self heal of renewal over Cenarion Ward or (a mostly uncontrollable) YG.

This is of course according to my experience, and only in 10man raiding. YG might have more of a home in 25man.

Abilities and set bonuses aside, have anyone started looking at stats on pieces for a new BIS list for 5.4?

If you take a look at the gear that was added recently, you'll notice nearly all of it has spirit on it, even though its placeholder name specifies that it should have different stats. It's probably not safe to start making lists just yet.

At the moment stats are same on t16 as t15 idk atm that it will be changed in coming ptr testing or it will change so cant figure out the wht is the BiS list atm but for looking some other loots in table like trinkets i think Haste will be prio stat for Resto druid rather than Mastery like very minor diffrence not big

Cenarion Ward is just garbage. It's quite useless at saving people in its current form and almost never worth the mana or gcd. For one, it requires the person to take damage for it to even activate. When someone is low, you want to heal them before they take any more damage that might kill them. Then when it does proc, the first tick doesn't come for a whopping two seconds--and it heals for crap. It isn't really until the second to third ticks that it does any decent healing that I would consider as "lifesaving". If you want need a fast, hard hitting, life saving heal, use NS+RG/HT, RJ+SM, mushroom (yes even uncharged it is better than CW), RJ+genesis, or just a plain old regrowth. While some of those spells might be more expensive than CW, they are significantly more likely to save someone's life when time is a factor.

Why are you revisiting a dead topic? You have made it clear that you despise CW and that is just fine. YG is going to be for the people who don't want to deal with an extra spell or for those fights without raid spike damage. CW will be for those who want to try and make the extra effort to pull more from their toolkit. Let people formulate their own opinions instead of forcing your own repeatedly. It's getting old.

Edit: Sorry it wasn't Napalm007 that's been constantly posting about CW being trash but still. I think at this point there's been enough discussion on it going both ways.